Just Hungry

If you are new here, welcome! Just Hungry is a food blog, established in 2003. It has received several mentions on main stream media sites including the Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, Epicurious, Gourmet Magazine, Cooking Light and Food and Wine, and is the top ranking Japanese recipe blog on Google.

Just Hungry started out in 2003 as a place for me, Makiko (Maki for short) to write about my food obsessions. I am Japanese, born in Tokyo, but have led a very nomadic existence since childhood. I’ve lived so far in Japan (three places), England (three places), the U.S. twice (a total of 6 places), and now in Switzerland. This is reflected in what I write about here.

My primary focus on Just Hungry is Japanese food and home cooking. As a Japanese person living abroad, I do miss the cuisine I grew up with a lot, and that is what I mostly cook at home regardless of where I live. I try to always present recipes and methods for people who do not live in Japan, and may not be familiar with Japanese cooking or have access to a wide selection of Japanese ingredients. I know through experience that it’s not always easy to cook Japanese food outside of Japan, but my recipes are authentically Japanese enough to satisfy my worst critic - me!

Other things I write about on occasion include:

• The food life of an expatriate - living away from ones home country and dealing with sourcing food and food-homesickness. This includes trying to replicate some recipes from my second home country, America - specifically the food of New York City.
• The cuisine of my current countries of residence, France and Switzerland, and neighboring countries.
• Healthy and casually ethical eating and cooking.
• Food-oriented travel, wherever my wandering feet take me.

Just Hungry’s little sister is Just Bento, a site dedicated to (o) bento lunch recipes and how-tos.

Contact

If you have a question that doesn’t need to be private, such as “What is this ingredient?”, or “Where do I get such-and-such?” etc., or you just want to say hi/thanks/you suck, please post it in the Just Bento/Just Hungry forums. Thank you!

Otherwise, please go to the Contact page.

Advertising, promotion and product reviews

For all advertising and promotional enquiries, including requests for product reviews and link backs, please consult the advertising and promotion policies page.

Copyright and Terms Of Usage

All contents of Justhungry.com and Justbento.com, excluding comments written by others, are © Makiko Itoh, unless stated explicitly otherwise. All rights reserved. You may not republish the contents on either site without the express written permission of Makiko Itoh.

Please do not copy the recipes, photographs or any other contents without 1) linking back to the original recipe, and 2) giving the proper credit to Just Hungry. I know that recipes are always there to be used and adapted, but please have the basic courtesy to acknowledge the source.

Please do not use any photographs without first asking permission, even if it’s for a non-profit purpose.

Students: If you wish to use an image or other content on this site for your non-commercial classwork, you do not have to ask permission, but you must give credit to this site.

You may not use the contents of this site within a frameset housed on another site without the express written permission of Makiko Itoh.

Disclaimer Regarding Recipes

Unless a source is stated, the recipes are my creation, or else are traditional recipes with no traceable source. I try to give very clear instructions, and test each recipe several times before posting it publicly. However, since following a recipe can depend on many things I can’t guarantee that your results will be to your taste.

Technical information

Justhungry.com and Justbento.com run on on Drupal, an open source content management system. It’s hosted on dedicated servers at The Planet. Design, implementation and customization by PRODOK Engineering.

Privacy policy

Some cookies are set by Just Hungry and/or Just Bento in order to track site usage, logged in status, and so on, as well as statistics for our in-house private banner ads. We do not, and never will, store any of your private information in this manner.

Some of our ads are served a third party, Google, which may store information (not including your name, address, email address, or telephone number) about your visits to this and other websites in cookies in order to provide advertisements about goods and services you may be interested in (the DART cookie). If you would like more information about this practice and to know your choices about not having this information used by Google, please visit this page: Google ad and content network privacy policy.

Email addresses: We do require a valid email address when you leave a comment or register on the Just Hungry or Just Bento sites. (Registration is mandatory to participate in the forums.) We require this to 1) prevent spammers and other annoyances, and 2) have a way to contact you (for password retrieval, etc.) We will never share your email address with any other party. We hate spam and unsolicited advertising more than you can imagine.

Comment and forum participation policy

• Please keep your comments polite and on-topic.
• Do not use the comments or forums for spam.
• It’s fine to disagree, but it’s not fine to be rude, insulting or aggressive. Don’t write anything that you wouldn’t say to someone in person, in someone’s house, just because you’re online and anonymous.

Any comments that violate these very simple policies will be deleted; registered members who violate these terms will be deleted and banned from all Just Hungry/Just Bento related sites.

Where else to find Maki

Just Bento, all about bentos!

Hungry For Words, a site about language, mostly Japanese.

My personal blog is makikoitoh.com, where I write about anything else, sometimes.

You can also follow me on Twitter (for site updates only, follow @justbento). For mostly Japanese tweets you can also follow my Japanese account.

The ever evolving FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions)

Are you a trained cook?

No I am not. Most of my cooking experience comes from observation - of my family, especially my mother and aunts, as well as my sister who is a professionally trained chef, and my other sister who is a busy mother of two active kids in Japan. I’m also spurred on by a constant curiousity about how things are done. I also have more than 150 250 (I’ve lost count actually) cookbooks and I actually use many of them.

I worked at one time at very busy New York City restaurant called Sushisay, the top rated Japanese restaurant in the city for many years. I think that having been on the “other side” gives me a good perspective on how restaurants, waiters/waitresses, and reservation systems work, not to mention how hot it can get (in more ways than one) in a professional kitchen.

What camera do you use?

My early, fairly horrible photos were taken with a Nikon Coolpix 880, but I didn’t read the manual properly! Since then I’ve used a Nikon D70s as well as a series of cellphones with cameras (such as the Nokia N9x series) for informal shooting on the road. I currently (as of 1st quarter 2010) use the following cameras: A Nikon D700 (DSLR) with Nikkor macro and 50mm lenses; a Panasonic Lumix DMC-GF1 (micro-four thirds format); a Sony Cybershot DSC-W300 (small point and shoot), and an iPhone 3Gs. And there’s always Adobe Photoshop to fix things when they go wrong.

Are you a vegetarian or vegan?

No I’m not, but I do have a fairly low-meat diet compared to the typical Western diet. I also find it quite challenging to come up with recipes that are vegan or vegetarian but still taste great to omnivores, so you’ll see a fair amount of those types of recipes here.

Who designed this site, and what do you use to run it?

The site is designed by me - I am (or was) a web designer and developer until very recently. It was hosted on Typepad since its inception, but as of August 2006 it is hosted on an independent server. Until February 2007 it ran on Movable Type, when it was ported to Drupal. I can highly recommend Drupal for managing a busy site (hey, even Whitehouse.gov runs on Drupal!), or even a group of sites, though it is not for novices (some PHP and MySQL knowledge helps a lot). (For what it’s worth, Just Hungry and Just Bento run from one Drupal installation.)

Who takes the photographs on your site? What about the illustrations?

I take 95% of the photos here. Max and other friends have taken the others. All the illustrations, icons, etc. on the site are by me.

Why don’t you write in Japanese (or German or French since you live in Switzerland)?

I’ve lived outside of Japan for so long that I can think and write a lot better in English, though recently I have been contemplating starting up a Japanese blog. As for writing in German or French…it would take a bit too much time, or be unintentionally funny with all the grammatical errors.

Are you really Japanese? I read somewhere that you’re not Japanese, or you’re half/hapa.

Both my parents are Japanese and so are their ancestors as far as we know, so I think that makes me 100% Japanese. 一応、日本人です。（何でこんな噂が流れるのかなー、ネットって不思議ですね。）

Can you design my site for me?

Unfortunately I do not have the time to take on web design projects these days, unless it really interests me. If you would like to consult me please get in touch with me.

Can you link to my site/blog?

Please feel free to link back to me or to email me about your site, but I can’t guarantee I will mention it, link to it, or put it in my blogroll. If I read and like your site I may link to it. Pestering me to do so will not get you far really. I do not participate in link exchange programs.

Does Just Hungry accept guest posts?

Nope. This is my personal food site so to speak, and I do not accept any guest posts here, unless it’s from very close friends or family (and even that is rare). Just Bento does occasionally open up for guest posts. Look for open calls for guest posts over there.

I want more!

You can try the more esoteric about page on my personal site. Also see the following posts here:

• The 5th Anniversary posts, starting here. Day 2, Day 3, Day 4, Day 5.
• The Just Bento 1st Anniversary posts, which looked back even further: kindergarten, elementary school, middle school, high school and beyond.